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The leaders: Dalton McGuinty, ‘Premier Dad’

Time isn’t always kind to politicians. It’s an axiom of the game. Think about it: Jean Chrétien, Mike Harris, Bob Rae, George Bush and Barack Obama all look like they’ve been through the spin cycle.

There’s one exception: Dalton McGuinty.

He’s 56 and six-foot-two; his weight barely fluctuates. During the current campaign for a third term as premier, McGuinty weighs 185 pounds, pretty much the same as when he led the Liberals to victory in 2003. Good Lord, it’s spooky, Dorian Gray-ish, and depressing as hell for his male colleagues. They eye their creeping girth — they’re turning into their fathers — and avert their eyes from old campaign photos in which McGuinty is the same.

“He hasn’t changed, same weight, same hair, everything about him looks exactly the same,” says Rob Silver, who was McGuinty’s senior policy adviser during his first two years as premier. “I’ll never forget when I worked for him, the assistant would bring in a plate of cookies at 4 o’clock and everybody else took two or three,” recalls Silver. “He would take one cookie and you’d see later he’d taken three teeny little mouse bites. That was it and you knew he was going to go home and work it off.”

He still does. McGuinty is a man of habit. Every evening, whether at home in the small midtown house not far from Queen’s Park he shares with wife Terri or their cherished family home in Ottawa, the routine is the same. The knees are gone now and he can’t run or use the rowing machine, but he gets in 20 to 40 minutes on the bench with free weights and takes brisk walks when he can. He watches what he eats, favouring fish and salads, stays away from carbs and never snacks between meals. “You know your metabolism tends to slow down as you age.”

He’s been exercising since he bought a pair of weights in Grade 12 in Ottawa.

“I’ve always been determined to make the most of myself,” he says. “That’s just who I am.” His motto is mens sana in corpore sano. “President Kennedy once said physical fitness is the basis of all excellence, and I believe that.” (JFK is a hero to McGuinty, Ontario’s first Roman Catholic premier since John Sandfield Macdonald in 1867.)

His big blowout comes Friday night, when he whips up his special nachos and guacamole and nurses two beers. He and the former Terri Taylor, his high school sweetheart, often settle in for a movie, one of the shoot-‘em-ups he loves, a spy flick or anything Robert Osborne is showing on Turner Classic Movies. He’s a huge fan, as he was of the late Elwy Yost’s Saturday Night at the Movies on TVO.

How many bites of a cookie he allows himself may seem trivial in the portrayal of a life, but it’s essential to understanding McGuinty’s character.

His discipline can be the butt of jokes. One sly commenter is only half kidding with the line: “Dalton is like a Stepford Wife.”

When he speaks, one hears his Ottawa Valley forebears, both Irish and French, upright, industrious and plain-speaking. No hoo-ha. He talks about values, and the booming voice of his father, Dalton Sr., a man of “deep, deep convictions and an incredible work ethic” echoes through time. One hears Betty, the full-time nurse and mother of 10 whom her son describes as “the compass in the family.”

The words come straight from the elbows-out, eat-what’s-put-in-front-of-you-and-be-thankful dinner table of his youth: “You just have to do the best you can. You’re going to drive yourself crazy otherwise. Do what you think is right and when you make a mistake, own up to it.”

A gift from the past.

On a gorgeous early autumn afternoon, McGuinty settles in for a chat in his Queen’s Park office on the second floor of the main Legislative Building, looking south toward University Ave. A scheduled 20 minutes stretches into a relaxed hour. When it’s suggested that he has overcome the terrible shyness of his first run for the premiership in 1999, he says it’s more about confidence: “I’m confident in my skin now.”

Brother Brendan explains he’s become “far more sure of himself.” Gerald Butts, friend and former principal secretary, says of McGuinty: “He’s one of the most authentic people I’ve met in my life. What you see is what you get. He doesn’t play games with people.”

He’d like that description. Nice and simple. It suits Ottawa Valley people, sure, but there’s more. McGuinty devours books on another hero Abraham Lincoln, a leader certainly without pretension. He tells the story about how someone called Lincoln “two-faced” and he replied: “If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”

This is going to sound corny, but in some ways McGuinty’s a corny kind of guy. Here’s his take on life: “If I wake up in the morning and my wife still loves me and my kids are still talking to me, I know I’m in the right place. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Asked to describe himself, he says, “I’m a man who’s madly in love with my wife,” and manages not to sound like Forrest Gump. Sorta.

On a table behind his desk are family photos, the late Dalton Sr. and Betty, 82 now, as well as Terri and their four adult children, Carleen, Dalton, Liam and Connor. He’s one of those people who keep quotations handy. His current favourites are on a sheet of paper under glass on his desk and include a quote from former U.S. president Calvin Coolidge about persistence and a long passage by his most admired Canadian politician, Sir Wilfrid Laurier: “I am a Liberal. I am one of those who think that everywhere in human beings, there are abuses to be reformed, new horizons to be opened up and new forces to be developed. This condition of our nature is precisely what makes for the greatness of man . . .”

He has occupied the premier’s office since 2003, after an unsuccessful first campaign for the job in 1999. It was a baptism by fire. The Ontario Tories were masters of the negative ad campaign long before Stephen Harper’s Conservatives learned how to define and demolish relatively unknown Liberal leaders in ad blitzes. During the pre-writ period in 1999, then premier Mike Harris’s team dismissed the upstart McGuinty (Liberal leader since 1996) with a sneering: “Dalton McGuinty: Not up to the job.” (In 2003, they tried “still not up to the job,” but by then, Ontarians had their own opinions.)

In the 1999 leaders’ debate he was nervous and performed poorly. He blamed himself, says Bryant. “He felt he didn’t have enough content, enough to offer against Harris. He kept saying, ‘I should have prepared better. I’ll never let that happen again.’”

McGuinty improved to the point of becoming “the flawless performer of 2003 and 2007,” according to Bryant in a comment before the 2011 leaders’ debates, which took place on Tuesday, nine days before the Oct. 6 vote.

In this debate, the veteran McGuinty performed curiously, adopting fidgety hands that mesmerized the viewer. “Jazz hands,” somebody joked. It was uncharacteristic for a man of such sparing movement, and a senior Liberal adviser later told the Star’s Robert Benzie it was intentional. The gesturing was designed to appeal to women, to show “he still has the fire in his belly even after eight years.”

Possibly. But veteran PC strategist Leslie Noble, who’s coached many a candidate, says “he looked more nervous than I’ve ever seen him. I think the Liberal post-debate spin was just that: spin.”

Life with the McGuintys when Dalton was growing up sounds like one of those madcap movies from the ‘30s with Cary Grant in horn-rimmed specs as the dad — always a moral — and an old jalopy that belches as much as runs.

Dalton Sr. taught English literature at the University of Ottawa and cooked up family projects that included a full-service summer camp they built themselves on Quebec’s Lac St.-Pierre. In 1987, he took the provincial riding of Ottawa South from the Conservatives and, three years later, had a fatal heart attack.

Dalton Jr. is an accidental politician. He was a partner in Ottawa’s McGuinty & McGuinty law firm with brother Dylan when his father died.

“Dalton was the oldest boy and he just stepped up,” says Brendan of his brother winning Ottawa South in the 1990 election. Dalton Sr. was the dazzler, the Olivier or Barrymore character with charisma to burn. Dalton Jr. was more Maxwell Smart than Sir Laurence.

“I don’t think Dalton is a natural politician,” adds Brendan. “He’s not a glad-handing backslapper. But that’s not what he set out to do.”

Still, McGuinty’s political success is impressive. “I think he’s found his groove,” says Liberal consultant Patrick Gossage. “Trust is quite a big thing, and he’s learned how to project trust in a Harper-esque kind of way.”

Critics counter that he’s morphed into a one-man government who likes to keep the big deal-making in the Premier’s Office and kneecaps alpha males. Hence, a regular exodus of prominent ministers, among them Bryant, George Smitherman and Gerard Kennedy.

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Kennedy didn’t get back to the Star. Both Bryant and Smitherman insist they worked for a saint. Says Bryant: “Every person left for their own reason, Smitherman to run for mayor of Toronto (unsuccessfully in 2010), Kennedy for the federal Liberal leadership (which he lost in 2006) and me because I wanted to go to (the city corporation) Invest Toronto. Dalton gave us ample opportunities, and I don’t know where this criticism comes from. It’s just human nature, I suppose.”

McGuinty tenses at the question about running the show solo: “That is not true, it’s definitely not true. Take a look at my history and you’ll see I brought people who ran against me in the (1996) leadership into my cabinet.” He’s referring to, among others, the departed Kennedy or Finance Minister Dwight Duncan. “I want strong people.”

He’s reminded of an anecdote in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. As a young lawyer, Lincoln once did courtroom prep work for a seasoned pro who looked upon him with distaste, telling an acquaintance: “I don’t want to be seen with that ape.”

The slur reached Lincoln’s ear. Nevertheless, in 1962, with the Civil War in a dark place, then President Lincoln appointed that lawyer, Edwin M. Stanton, to be his secretary of war. Asked why, Lincoln said “talent.”

Perhaps Premier Dad (a nickname he likes because he aspires to be a good father above all) does tend to govern from the bubble. But maybe it’s only natural that someone from a tight family of 12 that always found sustenance within itself still finds strength within that family. The power circle most often cited contains those he’s trusted longest — wife Terri and brothers Brendan, Dylan and Ottawa MP David. It seems only a few outsiders — Don Guy, Gerald Butts — crack the magic circle.

But is he? Brendan says the premier is the “jokester” of the family. For a time as kids, he and Dylan used code names. “They attended a unilingual French school and they knew no other boys named either Dylan or Dalton . . . so they came up with Jack and Jerry.”

Premier Jerry. A funny image.

Nondescript? Well, from behind his desk he stretches out long legs and the realization comes as quite a shock: Dalton McGuinty looks sexy in jeans. Who knew?

Okay, but he’s still Maxwell Smart.

He can be considerate, sensitive. Molly Finlay, a former senior communications adviser, has “this really gentle feeling about Dalton.” Her second daughter was only a week old at Christmas 2007 and she was dying to go to the McGuinty’s at-home Christmas party. “I brought my newborn and he held my baby for the whole night.”

Butts remembers working on debate preparation during the 2003 campaign when his wife was 4 ½ months pregnant. She called from the hospital to say she’d had a miscarriage. “Dalton put his hand on my shoulder and just said, ‘Go! There is nothing we are going to do that’s more important than your family. Go home and stay there for as long as you need.’ “

The interview is winding down, and McGuinty is talking about the hardest time in his life, the death of his father.

“Death is obviously a part of life,” he begins. “It teaches you things and it taught me that it’s not just about things that are said, but the things left unsaid. I never told my father how much I loved him, how much I looked up to him or how much he inspired me.”

He trails off. “But surely,” prompts the reporter, “he must have known.”

“Oh yes. I know that he did.”

Another pause. “But I am a dad now and I learned from that to be more open and stop that phony stoicism that males take on in our society.”

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